5. Elio
Chapter Five
ELIO
Kyle Hobbs was tested on Saturday morning for performance-enhancing drugs, suspended immediately until the results arrived, and doomed our wavering captain to public embarrassment within the same quarter of the hour.
Two days later, the team was in the locker room. Kyle, the frontrunner for the captaincy in case Easton lost the final shreds of confidence, was not present. His name was no longer in the running. And neither was Easton.
Patrick looked around the locker room, where guys were putting on their protective gear. “Do you think he’s giving up?” he asked.
“How should I know?” It wasn’t like Easton ever told me anything that mattered.
Looking back, Easton almost never spoke about his past. He was from a small town, but he never said the name.
He was adopted late, at seven years old, but he never spoke of his parents or the time before it.
He mentioned some musical training, but he shifted away from the topic when I asked about it.
Most importantly, he’d never told me the reasons Kyle hated him.
It wasn’t just Easton. Kyle hated his friends, too. And Kyle’s friends were loyal to that hound.
So, when I sat on my bench and looked at the Steel Saints, I didn’t see a team that was about to unite after a catastrophe. I didn’t see a path for us to learn a lesson and apply what we knew. I saw a problem that was about to be thrust into my hands.
I would never live up to this responsibility.
It was a small mercy when Assistant Coach O’Brien walked in alone and charted out the subgroups for today’s drills.
He mixed and matched players in a way we usually didn’t.
It almost felt like the entire team had been replaced by newbies who’d never played together, and Coach O’Brien needed to see us in action before making any further decisions.
Head Coach Webber wasn’t present just now, but he would join us, Coach O’Brien had said before sending us out on the ice.
The game was awkward, but no more awkward than it had been over the last two weeks.
The focus was on me, and I couldn’t say I liked it.
Coach O’Brien, as well as Coach Webber, once he appeared, put me with different subgroups, drilling my decision-making rather than any tactics.
They recreated various situations with other groups, putting me in with my little teams and observing how I coped.
Tricks and tactics were often prepared in advance.
Those were the things we practiced the most between the games.
We simulated scenarios and tested various ways to make the best out of them.
But today, those things seemed secondary.
The captain, largely a symbolic figure, still needed to inspire action.
And if I were to take on the task, I needed to lead this lot.
It was the only thing that was left to me.
However, the captain still needed to make quick decisions in the heat of a skirmish.
After a few rounds, it was clear that the entire day’s training was about evaluating the speed of my actions.
Part of me wanted to stop, toss the stick aside, and admit aloud what I had been feeling for weeks. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want the captaincy, and I didn’t want my team to be ripped into shreds. This was no way to build a career.
Besides, I wasn’t fit for the job. Sure, there was nobody else more fit for it.
Lennox could have been that guy if he weren’t so brutishly rough.
Connor was liked by everyone, but he was a happy-go-lucky sort of guy with a cavalier approach that didn’t exactly make for a confident leader.
And the worst of all, every single pair of eyes brimmed with the same sort of skepticism. Nobody wanted the captaincy like this.
Maybe, in some other lifetime, I would have loved the challenge. Maybe, if I weren’t in conflict with the whole, wide universe, leading the Saints out of the pit would have been fun. But that wasn’t the life I was living.
After the practice, Patrick came up to me again, ripping off his pads.
“Don’t you think we should check on him?” he asked. He wore his signature scowl, which clashed with the outpouring of friendly concern.
I shrugged. “Do whatever you want. I’ve got bigger problems to deal with.”
Patrick looked at me with cold, blue eyes, not a sliver of affection in them. “I understand.” He turned away from me and picked up his towel.
Guys filed into the showers one after another, and I followed. I kept my gaze on the tiled floor as I walked between the stalls, slipped into a shower, and let the sweat drain away. I wished my worries could go off so easily, but no amount of hot water helped with that.
Something was tugging on my heart harder than ever before. A sadness I didn’t know where to place. Too many battles, too many defeats.
I felt it stronger than ever. Something was missing. Part of my mind reached out, feeling the space, wandering through the bits and pieces of my life, searching for the missing things.
Nothing.
I’d hoped to find the place where it had been, whatever it was. I’d hoped to see its shape and fill it in with my imagination. But there was only a feeling of emptiness that was slowly but surely eating me from the inside out.
I returned to the dorm room exhausted but unable to lie still. It was even more unbearable when Patrick arrived. He’d stayed out after practice, carrying his backpack with him all afternoon. He shut the door and stared at me. “He’s not picking up his phone, Elio.”
I gritted my teeth. “Maybe he’s sleeping.”
Patrick tilted his head furiously. His lips curled into a sneer of disdain, and his eyes cut deep into my soul. “You’re not worried at all.”
I exhaled, wishing I could sink into the mattress and disappear from his line of vision. Was I worried about Easton?
“He’s been coming in with bruises for a month, Elio,” Patrick said. “And Kyle outed him in front of everyone.”
I knew that. Why was he parroting the same goddamn thing over and over again? I didn’t want to think of things going through Easton’s mind. I didn’t want to have another worry on my plate.
“We should check on him,” Patrick decided.
“Good luck with that,” I said.
Patrick’s eyes flared like blue ice. “You’re a shitty friend.”
I sat up, my feet thumping on the floor.
“You called, didn’t you? And he hasn’t answered.
What else can you do? In the two years I’ve known him, he hasn’t invited me over once.
I don’t even know where he lives. Half an hour up north from here isn’t an address, Patrick.
So, if you don’t have an actual plan, please get off my back.
” I got up and took my jacket from the hanger by the door.
“Where are you going?” Patrick asked.
“The library,” I muttered.
I walked out of the room because the tension was rising once again, turning the very air stuffy and unbreathable.
Yeah, Easton was somewhere in this city, probably alone and licking his wounds.
The image of him trapped like this battered against the glass dome I had placed over my soul.
I didn’t have the strength to tackle it.
I didn’t have the emotional capacity to extend myself so far.
I didn’t go to the library. Instead, I went to the student center and the bar at the heart of it, where a lot of athletes played darts or pool, watched whatever games were on the TV, and bonded in ways the Saints hadn’t in years.
My mission was not to get drunk, but the chatter and the atmosphere of the bar made it too easy to forget my objectives.
I wanted to be left alone. In fact, I wanted things to go back to how they had been a few weeks ago.
Easton had been the captain, and Jaxon had still, in my mind, been in New Haven.
I had my friends around me, and Jaxon had barely been a faint scar on my heart.
I ordered a beer and sat down like a hard-boiled detective in the opening scene of a dated police procedural.
Just glancing in the mirror behind the bar, I could see myself that way.
Divorced, unshaved, disheveled, wearing a dirty trench coat and drinking something hard to numb the pain.
Yeah, I was turning myself into a cliché.
The beer was cold and delicious. My heart flickered with joy at the taste of it.
I’d denied myself this indulgence as often as I could get away with it.
Sometimes, when the team celebrated some small victory, like the state quarterfinals, I had no choice but to order a drink.
Other times, when the mood was right, Easton, Patrick, and I drank a beer or two.
But I never got drunk. Not since two years ago when the booze had clouded my mind, and Jaxon dragged me into his room.
I ordered another beer before I knew it. The flavor was too rich, the numbness too tempting. It went down like honey. Knots loosened and untied in places I hadn’t realized were tense. My body melted a little, my shoulders sagged, and my mind roamed a little more freely.
Was this how it started? I wasn’t sure I had it in me to fight against the pull.
I could almost feel the allure. Ronan Mercer must have felt this way.
Of course, in Ronan’s case, wealth and fame opened pathways for him that I couldn’t dream of.
Those wild parties. Those girls of drugs and drugs on girls…
So what if he was a scarecrow these days? So what if his was the story told to rising stars to warn them against that path? He was still rich, although considerably more alone and infamous rather than famous.
And then, I looked to the door of the bar, seeing Ronan’s little brother walk in with a scowl.
He was flanked by four guys, each bigger than the one before, built for the football battlefield and scanning the place for trouble.
Jaxon wore the stain of his brother’s actions simply because they shared the last name.